News Archive

The latest issue (Janary 2009) of the Official Journal of the EPO, contains a Communication announcing a deadline for submitting third party observations (an amicus curiae brief). The deadline set is the end of April. Submissions should be addressed to the Registry of the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

The complete Communication is attached to this article.

Recent diverging decisions by the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office have led the President of the EPO, Mrs. Alison BRIMELOW, to refer a point of law to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

The referral, dated Wednesday 22 October 2008, invites the Enlarged Board of Appeal to clarify how the exclusion for programs for computers in Article 52(2) and (3) EPC is to be interpreted. More specifically, the questions referred relate to the relevance of the claim category for the applicability of the exclusion, to clarify when a claim as a whole falls under the exclusion, to what extend individual features of the claim contribute to the technical character, and a question concerning the activity (the programming) underlying the resulting (computer) product.

This article contains a selection of sections from the “Board of Appeal and Enlarged Board of Appeal Case Law 2006”, as published in Special Edition Number 6 of the Official Journal of the European Patent Office. The selected sections all bear relevance to the subject of computer-implemented inventions. The sections have only been slightly reformatted for this site; the contents has been left untouched.

The June issue of EPI Information features an article by EPO Director Joerg Machek, and EPO Examiners Daniel Closa, Patrick Corcoran, and Clara Neppel on the EPO examination practice with regard to computer-implemented inventions. Four illustrative examples are given with increasing technical content to illustrate how the EPO deals with applications concerning computer-implemented inventions.

The article appears to target Representatives not familiar with the specificalities of computer-implemented inventions and the prosecution of patent applications thereof.